FaceDeer

Why does it matter if the Russian people know that? It’s not like they can will more tanks into existence, or just imagine foreign trade and get tangible goods as a result.

Russia’s actual real physical power has been broken by this war. Their demographic future is doomed. Their economy is in ruins. It doesn’t matter if the Russian people are happy with that, they can paint big “Z” marks on their wretched hovels in patriotic ecstasy and it won’t have any actual impact on anything.

It’d be ideal if Ukraine could have an outright victory and end the war fast, but failing that all that’s necessary is for Ukraine to survive and it can wait out Russia’s collapse.

Putin didn’t start this war because he specifically hated Ukraine and wanted it destroyed, even at the cost of Russia’s existence. He started it because he wanted to make Russia great again. In that regard the war is an utter failure.

Of the war maybe, but Russia’s future economy and demography are very much going to have long term impacts from these losses.

I think people are being too pessimistic about Trump in this context. Trump is terrible, sure, but one of the things that makes him terrible is total self-interest. I don’t think he’s as reliable a puppet of Putin as commonly thought.

I’m thinking perhaps Putin is worried Trump might decide to flip the script and act the tough guy against him this time, since Putin is significantly weaker now than in his previous term. Getting Kursk back would be absolutely vital if it looks like Trump is going to try to freeze the conflict or force negotiations.

The GOP as a whole is not reliably pro-Putin either, there are some hawks in there that would love to finish Putin off.

In general, this is an uncertain time approaching.

I’ve found my participation slowly declining here on the Fediverse, and ramping back up again on Reddit. I think I’m never going to stop coming here entirely, there’s plenty of neat links that come along to explore, but the main thing that’s causing decline is that IMO the communities here are a lot “bubblier.” It’s probably inherent in the simple fact that they’re small, and that they’re populated by a very self-selected fragment of social media, but the result is that if I “say the wrong thing” I get pummeled with downvotes and snide comments a lot easier here. Makes it less interesting to comment at all. Some of Reddit’s communities are pretty insular too but at least there are enough of them that I can find ones to my taste.

As a major example that comes to mind, all of the technology communities I’ve found here seem to be quite strongly anti-AI. I have an interest in AI, but when I click through to the comments on stories about AI topics it’s often nothing but rants about how awful it is. And if I say anything - even to correct a factual error - I get piled on. So lately I just sigh and move on.

Europe has freight trains too.

I don’t see why this is a point worth quibbling about. The “gag” is that rails are designed for self-driving vehicles, but most trains are not self-driving. It’s only relatively recently that any of them are.

Most trains aren’t public transit, either. They’re freight haulers.

That’s not most trains. Those are highly specialized and constrained applications. There are already self-driving taxis in certain defined city areas, so they’re still ahead by that standard.

Trains don’t self-drive, though.

Edit: Okay, for the pedants: most trains don’t self-drive.

Same here, I’d much rather have one of these as a personal vehicle than anything tracked.

There have been many systems developed over the years for handling decentralized data storage, decentralized user identities, and decentralized decision-making. There are excellent options out there for all this stuff.

IMO the problem is that there’s a huge “not invented here” problem, combined with a popular “ew, I don’t want to be associated with that technology (or more accurately with the group behind that technology)” reflex that has nothing to do with the technology itself. So projects like the Fediverse keep reinventing the wheel over and over, and whenever a project manages to do something right it’s rare for the other projects to abandon their own implementations to borrow from the best.

It’s unfortunate that there’s such a powerful knee-jerk prejudice against blockchain technology these days that perfectly good solutions are sitting right there in front of us but can’t be used because they have an association with the dreaded scarlet letters “NFT.”

Not only can AI do that, it probably does it far better than a human would.

I like XKCD’s solution. Aside from the fact that it would heavily reinforce whatever bubble each community lived in, of course.

It’s getting creepy just how fast these guys whip out their suicide grenade. And the way he was just holding it and looking at it until it went off in his face… I can’t imagine what’s going through their heads (aside from shrapnel, of course).

Let’s just keep it between you and me for now.

If you divide the sides up to “people who care about this stuff” and “people who just want to make games”, then yeah. One side’s doing okay.

Frankly, nobody that’s involved in this fight are looking good to me on either “side.” It’s a fight that shouldn’t be happening at all. This is a game engine. Why is it a battleground for this?

Of course “Innocent people dying” would be the “free” square.

If it was completely sterile and artificial then I’d expect mummies instead of skeletons, there must have been some kind of bugs to munch up the leathery meat layer.

Kudos to the artist for putting clothing on the skeletons. So often pictures like this just have a skeleton sitting there and I’m left wondering why they were naked when they died.